THE JMC REVIEW Sitas... · otherness to selfhood. It involved saying no, we are not others, and then it involved imagining ... Dalit movements are beginning to find common ground

THE JMC REVIEW

An Interdisciplinary Social Science Journal of

Criticism, Practice and Theory

Volume 1

2017

262

The JMC Review, Vol. I 2017

TOWARDS A POSTCOLONIAL SOCIOLOGY?

A CONVERSATION WITH PROFESSOR ARI SITAS

Renny Thomas (Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, JMC)

Introduction

Ari Sitas is a distinguished South African sociologist, poet, activist, and one of the key

intellectuals of the post 1980s’ generation in South Africa. He is a professor at the Department of

Sociology, University of Cape Town. He has been a visiting professor at the Centre for

Historical Studies, JNU, where he offered a course on the histories and theories of nationalism in

the Monsoon Semester of 2016. He was part of the teach-in organised by JNUTA and delivered

the second class of a series of open classes on nationalism.1 He was invited by the Department of

Sociology, Jesus and Mary College on 14 March 2016 to give a special lecture on postcolonial

nationalisms.2 The idea of having a conversation with Prof. Sitas emerged after his lecture at

JMC. The interview took place at the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Study (JNIAS),

JNU, on 28 March 2016.

Renny Thomas: Prof. Sitas, let us start by discussing the new course that you are offering at the

Centre for Historical Studies, JNU, on nationalism?

Ari Sitas: It’s a course on the histories and theories of nationalism. It attempted to combine

actual narratives of nationalism, their emergence and theorising about such movements in a

systematic way. I wanted to get students out of the Indian tent and start talking about other anti-

colonial and postcolonial experiences through which they could ask new questions in terms of

what they are confronting at the moment. So I thought I would take Africa as the focus and deal

with Afro-pessimism and prejudice—the images of Africa on TV you saw everyday: refugees,

narratives that talk about failed states… failed nation states. Is it colonialism at fault? Is it the

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failed nation states, is it bad nationalism, good nationalism, is it religion, is it ethnicity? … So

beginning to ask these questions that appear to demonstrate that Afro-pessimists are always right.

We started from there, and we discussed a lot of ethnographic work that speaks of the arduous

passages of refugees into new lands and the crises that they are confronting, and moved towards

asking theoretical questions—you are reading Benedict Anderson, you are reading Partha

Chatterjee in your courses—but what is anti-colonial nationalism, and what was it in Africa? I

focus on that. These lectures made me start writing about it now, because I have realised that it

has not been dealt with properly because there is an assumption in the literature on nationalism

that nationalism in general is of the same family wherever it appears, and I am trying to impress

upon the students that anti-colonial nationalism differs: in Germany—let us say you are from

Munich, you are from Berlin, you might even be from Austria—but then comes a moment when

you say let’s rise against the X, the French, whereas anti-colonial nationalisms start from the

peculiar moment when, in the spot where you are born, where you drank your mother’s milk,

where you learnt how to speak, where you interacted with others, where you fell in and out of

love, in that space, you were classified and codified as an Other, in the land of your birth!

Therefore the movements on anti-colonial nationalism are precisely about the journey from this

otherness to selfhood. It involved saying no, we are not others, and then it involved imagining

what these people now arbitrarily brought together by colonial maps to find what is this ‘we’!

So we started the story in Africa, and we moved from there to explore kinds of theoretical and

historical issues. That is about the course.

RT: Isn’t the situation far more complex in Africa compared to India? Could you see any

similarities or parallels?

AS: There are enormous similarities and enormous differences. I think the similarity was

historical…there are linkages to the South African story and beyond, because at a certain point a

diminutive lawyer arrived in Durban and started an Indian Congress, and started non-violent

campaigns there. And African nationalists who were defined as natives and were rebelling

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against the definition decided to form at first a Native Congress, and then after reflection on the

word Native, started the African Congress when they were excluded racially from the emerging

union of South Africa. In a sense the story of India and South Africa gets close there, but then it

travels: if you take away Gandhi’s philosophy of being, and look at his philosophy of praxis, it

travels to Nkrumah, it travels to Kenyatta, it travels to Nyerere, who believe now that they

belong to a family of nationalists whose strategies combine militant but peaceful processes. So

there is kinship there.

Of course there are revolutionary traditions in Africa as well, where you start taking up arms

against colonial powers, but there is a high correlation between thickly settled societies by white

settlers and armed struggles: for instance, Algeria, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola, etc. South

Africa starts on a kind of non-violent mobilisation. At a certain point, after the repression of the

late 1950s and early 1960s, Mandela and company chose to pick up arms. So you have varieties

there.

Again, similarities and differences are at another level. My next book is going to be called

Regimes of Racial Derogation. I am dealing basically with three modalities of Othering. First is

the people who are exterminable, they are a kind of surplus other, you can do anything you like

with them, but they survive. But alas, they survive as minorities everywhere. So their discovery

of the movement from other to self has got its own distinct voice. It fractures any nation state

myth because their narratives have not been included, because they make everyone feel like an

impostor. For example, Native Americans in the entire continent. They are the Adivasi people of

the world.

Then there are others who were not exterminable but proved to be useful. Race of course comes

into it: they are homogenised in plantations in the Americas, as Mastery makes them work for

cotton, for sugar and so on. Through their experience of Othering, an Afro-American sensibility

and consciousness emerges. They constitute a different kind of ‘minority’ there. There it

incubates the dream of Africa and its pasts. They influence the emergence of African

nationalism, and their stories of exile and the need to return, the double consciousness that

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defines their being, that Du Bois and then Paul Gilroy talk about are a significant narrative. Yet it

is not the same experience as the one in colonial Africa, where the indigenous populations were

being defined as Natives, where they were excluded and broken up as tribes, as subjects of

customary law and therefore any assertion has to go through ethnicity to get onto a trans-ethnic

national self. So the intonation is different in both the demands. You too were useful Natives, but

because of the differentiations of caste and language, the classification by the British looked a bit

different from elsewhere in the colonial world.

Then comes this third category of derogation: “you people who are non-us,” and therefore Others

and therefore excludable. They were your indentured labourers, they were your refugees, and so

on. So I am dealing with these forms of derogation, and how, then, a non-identical, non-univocal

anti-colonial consciousness emerges. It is a kind of multiplicity of voices constructing what is

this Self and what its postcolonial Selfhood ought to be.

RT: From there, I would like you to discuss the very notion of pedagogy. You have been

teaching theories and histories of nationalism at JNU, and you were part of the teach-in series on

nationalism. How does this experience of witnessing the debates of nationalism and the various

events that followed in universities like JNU alter your understanding of nationalism, as a

teacher and scholar who is interested in understanding the idea of nationalism?

AS: I arrived here from South Africa at a time when an enormous challenge was being staged by

students (predominantly black) in some universities. They were asking for decolonisation

because, despite the transition to democracy, Eurocentrism and Whiteness were ruling the

curriculum. This also translated into a class question in all the universities as a Fees Must Fall

movement, where students were demanding an adequately subsidised education. The most

evocative act by them was the symbolic removal of Cecil Rhodes’s statue from the University of

Cape Town. It was called the Rhodes Must Fall campaign.

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Now over here, the student ferment is slightly different, but very very decisive. If it was just a

question of rationality or rational argument, a very simple argument against the irrationality of

those people who are mobilising against JNU would have won the day. But the ferment is caught

in a bigger game of power and violence. In my understanding, JNU has become a paradigmatic

devil that produces these abominable anti-nationals that need to be mobilised against. It is about

a communalist right using this panic to mobilise and expand its political base. I suspect, though I

am not an expert, that a couple of electoral shocks that they have experienced has made them

more shrill and shrewd, and I assume losing Delhi and losing Bihar must have been sending

alarm signals. So JNU becomes this space that needs to be corrected and it is remarkable to note

how the legal and the police systems have worked. For an outsider it is baffling. But what has it

done? It has created a new type of student movement; despite the historical and political division

between the students’ organisations, you find incredible synergy and a return to ideas of nation

and nationalism. I’m also listening very carefully to the kind of discourses that are articulated

even though I need translations all the time. But for the first time I understand that the left and

Dalit movements are beginning to find common ground. So are the older left of Congress and

AAP people coming to the party, and a whole range of voices now are beginning to be heard and

beginning to organise and resist the communalist version of nationalism. That’s what I see in

front of me.

Now what is the educational aspect of the movement and struggle at JNU? Students sit down,

listen to lectures, debate issues late into the night, write essays the next day, demonstrate the next

day, trying to bring solidarity across the campuses; and students are beginning to connect across

campuses in very interesting ways. Students never in and by themselves transform the world,

but they always come to constitute a ‘beginning’ of something radical and new. So as a

sociologist I am listening and observing very carefully.

In South Africa there was a much more immediate link with workers against outsourcing, so the

new demand of in-sourcing and the whole anti-neoliberal thrust came in as well in the struggles,

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and now certain universities are indeed moving towards in-sourcing. So things are beginning to

happen. Such an alliance between students and workers is not present in India at this stage.

Any participatory pedagogue would say that a lot of learning happens in social movements,

when you are in that liminal phase and what you desire is not there, and what you come from is

not livable any more, in that liminal stage a lot of learning happens.

RT: What you just said is extremely interesting. What is happening in India currently, as you

have pointed out, is that the very idea of nationalism is being misused by the right wing forces.

In this context, how do you think of a postcolonial nationalism in countries like India? How do

you define if there is something called postcolonial nationalism?

AS: You see, India is a fantastic laboratory of that. Already the debates were polarised and

barely held together in the transition to independence. The constitution has become a kind of a

synthesis of many of the tensions. There was commitment in the constitution for doing

something about not only freedom, but also equality. Once such a national project is in power,

promising equality, they are bound to be in a crisis precisely because of their inability to deliver

what has been promised. If we move now to Africa, what happened in the immediate first phase

was the promise of Uhuru or freedom and so on, but all of a sudden, criticisms of the first

postcolonial governments started and you even see military coups in the name of the nation to

protect it against the Kleptocrats. Civil society was seen as a cauldron of corruption, ethnicities

and parochialism so the military and/or authoritative rulers have to take over. You also have the

Cold War that sponsors dictatorial tendencies. So it was a big adventure of finding new ways of

defining this ‘We’-this post-THAT-national “we.” I use the words postcolonial and post-national

as institutional realities. I am not talking about them as a theoretical and discursive construction.

If you look at the creative literature in Africa, it has become a surrogate sociology because of the

university system being compromised after independence, with its vocal chords removed by

various political regimes—you will find tons of social critique in literature; very fascinating

writings about a concern about concrete subjects that the nation promised to deliver into a future.

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You witness a new idea of concrete individuality, of collectivity, ethnicity, genders, classes and

so, on coming alive as the new subject of literature. Such important writings started with Chinua

Achebe, then Ngugi wa Thiongo, Buchi Emecheta, Ayi Kwei Armah, Ousmane Sembène, then

Ben Okri later, much more postmodern in his The Famished Road, then you had the

Zimbabwean writers Chenjerai Hove, then Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions. They were

beginning to make real human claims about the gap between what was promised and the reality.

Many of them also had to leave the continent. But increasingly that became a counterpoint—a

contrapuntal, surrogate sociology.

RT: Connected with this is the whole notion of a postcolonial social science. In the discourse of

colonial social science, what you have is the powerful researcher and the powerless researched.

In postcolonial social sciences, we need to first question the very binary of the researcher and

the researched. Here we need to think about a new vision for social science. In that sense, do we

need to have a postcolonial sociology where we have to actually problematise what you had in

the colonial understanding of society? Can we then consider this new sociology as a postcolonial

critique? Do we need to think of a new sociology where not only do we question the very

methodology and epistemology that colonial sociology used, but also question the relationship

between the fieldworker and the field?

AS: Yes, indeed there has to be a new sociology. The postcolonial label is like a strategy—the

first step of a strategy. We are in the midst of an epistemic revolution. The South was and is seen

always as the parochial, traditional, underdeveloped space…you are that which is not Europe all

the time. That is your deficit. And to be modern you have to absent such deficits. Then you may

properly take off. You may then create a civil society. All that has become rather bankrupt.

If you take the narrative back to the 16th century and you start looking at modernity after that

initial forage of a few ships from Europe that inaugurated new interactions in the world, which,

after forage, involved settlement and in the long term colonisation, if you start the story of

sociology from there, all the continents become part of the entanglement. When you start looking

at that emerging sociality and you arrive at the Industrial Revolution where sociology usually

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starts, not as a virgin birth but as a process of entanglement, then you can start telling a different

story about what sociology is without anything becoming offending.

I show my students the map of 1650. I describe the world in 1650 and there is nothing traditional

there. Yes, there are gaps in between. Societies and social groups are running away from this

dynamic. In between you will find acephalous societies hiding here and there. Anthropologists

did find such societies much later. But when you start mapping the urban formations of the world

from the 11th century to the 15th century, you would be hard pressed to find a radiant Europe.

There is only one city that appears, Cordoba, and it is rather on the Islamic part of the equation.

In the rest of the world, yes, in the 11th century Bagdad was quite the metropolis, by the 15th

century there was Beijing, and all of a sudden there is a world that emerges that asks for

sociologists of urban life, not of a traditional society. Of course urban elites exploited the

hinterlands, of course many of them were not nice people, but give that history some credence

and dignity, please, from the Maya to the Qing.

Allow yourself to puzzle over the 15th and 17th centuries and ask yourself in a new way what

allows Europe to ascend and makes the rest experience involution and decline? Then finally you

are going to arrive at the late 19th century where Britain rules the waves, and everything is

London and London is everything; its money, its transactions, its imperialism, its culture,

everything creates a fascinating beacon. That was the first time in history that something like this

has been achieved: material and symbolic life coordinated by a small patch on the world map.

The USA after the second world war tried to emulate that. Now we are in an era where even US

hegemony is declining, there are breaks and cracks emerging and we don’t know where we are

going. But in all this we could start trying to nurture a proper sociology. And it will be an

interdisciplinary project to understand what our sociality is about. Anthropology and sociology

had a very peculiar role to play in the domination of most of the world. The British Sociological

Society did not start with a study of Marx, Weber and Durkheim, ‘the canon’; it started with a

launching of Galton’s Eugenics project in London. And anthropology was busy helping classify

and codify native rule everywhere. The past was regrettable and we need to start doing

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something else. But when I even look at Habermas, when he discusses the Other in Africa in his

theory of Communicative Action, he only uses Evans Pritchard. I am sorry to see this. And

when I hear my German colleagues say go back to Weber on the Chinese literati to understand

China, when there are twenty fantastic books by Chinese people and sinologists that disprove

anything sociologists have said, I despair. But sociologists do not talk about it, they don’t know

about it. That scholarship is part of Area Studies. We are in the grips of an epistemic

turbulence.

Secondly, those who were derogated, as I described before, are teaching us some profound

lessons: that without struggles by indigenous people the eco-sensitive new approach to the world

would have been about a couple of mad scientists in Europe who smoked forbidden stuff and

imbibed magic mushrooms! The critique of the subject–object dialectic of philosophy and its

origin in monotheistic religions that precedes and facilitates industrial civilisation. It is not

culture–nature anymore, it is something else.

We have to learn from all Others: from “Blacks,” from Dalits, from a whole range of voices that

are coming in that cannot be homogenised so easily. But of course, class still remains a horrific

reality. The fact that you have lost access to land, that you are potentially or really

proletarianised, that you are an immaterial digit if you ever get to a livelihood. All that continues.

And it continues today although sociology claims that we are in a post-industrial society. Since

the 1980s to the 2010s, production has tripled. The 1970s were supposed to be the highpoint of

industrial production, the time of Fordism. What has happened in India, China and in other

emerging powers is an unprecedented level of industrialisation. This is something horrific. There

are some societies that moved to post-industrial times: good services, technology, better life,

better cities and so on. But there is a crude reality of that old industrial civilisation that is with us

somehow.

Thirdly, you have to ask what is the university and what is knowledge and what do they have to

be in the present? What is this mix between the old monastic idea that you have to remove

yourself from the contamination of the world to develop “proper” knowledge. You strut out from

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the university, and you collect data, whether you are scientist or an anthropologist, you bring it

back in, you process it, and get it out as information, knowledge, refereed article and manuscript.

It is always a scholarship “of.” Then you hear, ‘you can’t be positivist’, ‘you need more

qualitative studies’, but what you do with qualitative is the same—you go out, you collect the

stories, better stories often, you bring them back, process them and where do they go?

But what is the university, what kind of marker does it constitute in society? Is it anything more

than the institution that facilitates differentiation and decides who will be the new elite? Even if

you are a student from the working class, or here in India from perceived lower castes, what are

you being groomed for? Is the university anything but a means to stratification?

Then you have movements of resistance that say knowledge is for the people, therefore we

cannot let it run away from that! We should transform the university or we should forget it—

knowledge-making should be part of movements, part of struggles, and knowledge is produced

through struggle with indigenous communities, for the struggle of indigenous communities, with

workers for workers. You get such juxtapositions and polarisations happening at the time when

social movements are on the rise.

Then, even if you escape the institutional snares, you will still need to create intensive

knowledge in certain areas that cannot be about immediate experience and dialogue. It will have

to be about science, about reading, about hermeneutic methodologies, which demand hard work

and only some and not all people have the talent for!

What in a sense I have been struggling with philosophically is to find my way through three

experiments. Now, if you look at my Parables3

experiment, that was an exploration of a way

through which story telling could lead to theorisation. It is not about the flatness created by

postmodernism that everything is text. That kind of story telling is a specific kind. It has to have

its own modalities. Why this experiment? It was because I was trying to find a dialogic way

through which people could deal with knowledge-making, and here I mean people who are less

empowered or more empowered than me. In their story telling narratives as part of vibrant oral

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cultures they were more empowered than me. I am more empowered than them because of the

books that I have read and in terms of having a lot of experience in pedagogic encounters, and

more theoretical training. I was searching for a more dialogic and oral form of communication.

This experiment is undecided. You should be the judge! Is it possible to co-theorise with people?

Secondly, I am struggling with genetics and epigenetics and works of people like Alexander

Luria, who was a sensible materialist in the Soviet Union and he was the person to start studying

orality and literacy and the transitions between the two. I don’t agree with him, but he as a hard

neurosurgeon began to show how the brain is not “determinist” as we thought it was. It allows

us to be creative, but you can’t wire it and unwire it. It is not about the hard neuro versus the soft

consciousness, but try to find the continuum between materiality and consciousness. I am very

fascinated now with the new literature on epigenetics, which is a corrective of genetic

determinism. I am working in that area.

And then, searching at the same time for the “emancipatory” in discourse and praxis, the ever

unreachable balance between equality and freedom. What I mean by that is that I am trying to

shift sociology and university away from the study of social behaviour in order to control it

towards putting it in the service of human flourishing. Once you come to understand what

constrains human flourishing, then you know what you have to remove in order to achieve it.

So I am experimenting. There are difficulties—difficulties of language, difficulties of logic

even. You really need to work with translations properly to create a philosophical dialogue. So

we are limited ontologically by the language we use.

My problem with many postcolonial writers, whom I respect a lot because of their egalitarian

impulse, is getting more pronounced. I raise my core objections in one of the essays in

Theoretical Parables which is called ‘Exploiting Phumelele Nene: Postmodernism, Intellectual

Work and Ordinary Lives.’ Their notion that there are multiple readings possible in any narrative

and our role is to decipher how powers play themselves out would, and could, lead to cynical

apathy. You do not have to risk failure in your analysis of veracity and reliability in your

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conclusions. You never have to take the risk and say it is this explication that is correct and make

yourself available to failure. There has to be a demonstrative aspect of what I am saying as a

scientist. It is not just discourse.

It is not a question of speaking for the subaltern or not being self-reflexive in terms of your

situational power—that was an important corrective by Spivak to all the celebration of speaking

for people, the middle class speaking for people, and anthropologists with their translators, their

native informants, providing for us the “authentic voice.” When a peasant woman asks, why do

you think my crop is wilting? – you need to be able to answer and say, it is the chemicals those

big farmers are pumping from the air onto the fields and live with the consequences of your

explication. It is not about gathering her voice for semiotic analysis in the university lab.

RT: I would like you to reflect upon the distinction between academic and activist. Do you

think it is important for an academic to be part of activism in postcolonial times? Can we teach

Social Science without being part of movements in times like ours? You have been part of

movements along with your teaching and research. What do you have to say on this?

AS: There were times when you had to lead a schizophrenic life where there was no relationship

between what you did as an academic and what you did as an activist, because university was a

hostile space. There were times when there was too much human kindness flowing out of the

university that made you panic because the university was claiming activism and celebrating you

for all the things they hated in you. In reality the university was reproducing the racial and class

structure in the context of South Africa.

I have encountered during those years three levels of activism. Firstly, it’s within the epistemic

community you belonged to. An attempt to create an environment where you could push the

knowledge project in a new direction. The second level is in terms of one’s own social life. As a

woman, and depending what kind of woman, there were and are power struggles against multiple

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patriarchies. They happen at all kinds of levels. Third, it happens in the workplace. One is

involved in the actual transformation of the workplace. Changing the way institutions work.

There is a lot of very fashionable literature now that plays the person and not the game. In other

words, yes, if Marx was a horrible patriarch, therefore his analysis in Capital was andro-centric

nonsense. Yes, you can find biases, faults, imperfect biographies in anyone. Is Marx wrong

because he was white, was Fanon right because he was black? What allows us to pass

judgements? But a lot of our colleagues these days rubbish movements, ideas, texts, literature

and so on by not really reading the work properly. On this I am at one with Foucault, kill the

author do not worry about his stool-training. But you know, one can make a career out of writing

the misdeeds of Gandhi. And we do.

RT: Lastly, what do you think is the crisis in postcoloniality today? What are we grappling

with?

I will speak as a sociologist. I think we are living in a time which is equivalent of the transition

that happened between the 15th and 17th centuries. We are living with the old hegemony that

established itself after the second world war, and tried to define the world according to a certain

image…well, it is waning. We have had crises proliferating. The old hegemon, let’s name her, the

USA, tried to establish and fix the world through a version of a market driven system and

through a series of regime changes. And that has not succeeded. So, we are seeing the moral

panic around deviance increasing. All of a sudden there is a multiplication of devils and

troublesome people who are creating uncertainty. We are seeing it now in terms of the

definitions of self and otherness, a capitulation to all kinds of gemeinschaft mandarins, of

cultural people, essentialists of note, who are going to bring values back and make the uncertain

certain. They are the strong men and women who are going to take the broken and make it whole

again, as it used to be. You are seeing the capitulation in India, you are seeing it in Europe, you

are seeing it in Africa, Latin America, everywhere. You are also seeing new religiosity coming in

and threatening the very fabric of secularism.

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Then you have counter movements that are trying to say that this world is unlivable. Whether it

is young people in Europe, the US, in Africa, India, you see energy among them towards a new

popular democratic and altruistic coexistence and visions of an alternative beginning to happen.

So we are caught between a system that’s unravelling, where we cannot say whether we are the

fixers and whether our fixing will be any good for anyone. This uncertainty creates ambiguities

that smash a lot of our seeming universals or forced universals at the moment.

That space that we call a country is needed more and more just for us to claw back some rights,

some freedom and some breathing space, and stop them running away from us through what we

have called globalisation.

We really do need a new language, emotive and theoretical, in the same old space in new times.

Britain thought they had us all sorted out in the late 19th century. What they created was

competition between nation states and wars. What I am saying is that the crisis also produces the

movements that are for me the most important of actors. I find more solace in indigenous

movements telling us about nature, movements of those derogated, telling us about equality and

group rights, serious artists reminding us that we need to think of living rights as well, not just

about abstract human rights. So on the one hand there is crisis, and on the other hand there is

hope. But it’s not a binary. It is not a dialectic, it is a polylectic.

As long as we are not creating laboratories of transformation in our spaces of work we will be

sucked into the more comfortable solution or being pragmatic digital participants of a complex

electronic horizontalism. It could be very comfortable for us because we can meet through

internet conferencing in Vienna, in Cyprus and Delhi, and talk to each other every day, and

imagine ourselves free from the nightmares around us.

RT: Thank you very much Prof. Sitas on behalf of The JMC Review.

AS: Thanks.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr. Taisha Abraham for proposing that I interview Prof. Sitas, and for

giving useful suggestions. I would also like to thank Prof. Ari Sitas for agreeing to have a

conversation for the The JMC Review.

1. His open class on nationalism took place at JNU on 19 February 2016.

2. Special Lecture by Prof. Ari Sitas on ‘Post-Colonial Nationalisms and Their Challenges’, organised by

the Department of Sociology, Jesus and Mary College, on 14 March 2016.

3. See Ari Sitas (2004). Voices That Reason: Theoretical Parables. Pretoria: University of South Africa

Press.

Documents

THE JMC REVIEW Sitas... · otherness to selfhood. It involved saying no, we are not others, and then it involved imagining ... Dalit movements are beginning to find common ground